Australia Network Study English Series 1 Episode 18 "Salinity"

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Hello, I’m Margot Politis. Welcome to Study English, IELTS preparation. Today we’re going to see an animation about a process called ‘salinity’, that’s where land becomes damaged by too much salt. We’ll be looking at language you can use to describe processes, including transition signals. Listen for how the process of salinity is described here.

— One of the main causes of salinity is waterlogging. First, land is cleared for crops to grow. Now, instead of trees pumping the water out of the ground, and keeping the salt stored, whatever water the crops don’t use percolates down into the soil. Gradually, over a number of years, the earth gets wetter and wetter, and eventually it waterlogs. Then, the water table starts to rise to the surface. As it rises, it dissolves the tonnes of salt stored in the soil. Once the water table comes to within two metres of the surface, it begins to evaporate. Lastly, the sun extracts the moisture from the ground, leaving the salt concentrated on the surface. The first casualties of this dramatic land change, and the dry land salinity that it causes, are ecosystems. —

We heard a description of a process. A process has a number of steps from beginning to end. When describing a process, the first sentence, or ‘topic sentence’, should tell us what the main idea of the paragraph is, and what the process is leading to. Listen to the topic sentence.

— One of the main causes of salinity is waterlogging. —

‘One of the main causes of salinity is waterlogging.’ This topic sentence tells us that the paragraph is about ‘salinity’, that is, land becoming salty. And the sentence tells us that one of the main causes of this problem is ‘waterlogging’. So from this sentence, we expect that the paragraph will be about the process of land becoming waterlogged, leading to salinity. When we describe a process, it is important that the reader understands when each part of the process happens, what order things happen in. Listen again to the passage, and watch for the words that order the stages of the process.

— First, land is cleared for crops to grow. Now, instead of trees pumping the water out of the ground, and keeping the salt stored, whatever water the crops don’t use percolates down into the soil. Gradually, over a number of years, the earth gets wetter and wetter, and eventually it waterlogs. Then, the water table starts to rise to the surface. As it rises, it dissolves the tonnes of salt stored in the soil. Once the water table comes to within two metres of the surface, it begins to evaporate. Lastly, the sun extracts the moisture from the ground, leaving the salt concentrated on the surface. —

She uses a range of transition signals to order the stages of the process. One type of transition signal is ordinal numbers. Listen.

— One of the main causes of salinity is waterlogging. First, land is cleared for crops to grow. —

The ordinal numbers are ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’, ‘fourth’ and so on. These ordinal numbers can be used as adjectives to form phrases describing order. We can either just start the sentence with:‘First,’ ‘Second,’ or we can use them in phrases like these:‘The first step is’; ‘The second stage begins when’; ‘The third part is’. We can also add ‘ly’ to ordinal numbers to make adverbs:‘firstly’, ‘secondly’, ‘thirdly’, ‘fourthly’, etc.